This article provides instructions on how you set up a catalog for Snapchat dynamic ads in Smartly.io. If you have an existing catalog you want to use in Smartly.io, see how to connect an existing Snapchat catalog.

For a basic catalog set-up, you do the following:

1. Create a catalog.
2. Add a feed and and define the feed field mappings.

We also recommend that you set up Smartly.io Image Templates, which allow you to add inspiring overlays to your Snapchat dynamic ads, making them more enjoyable and effective.

See more information on feed files and supported formats.

Limitations

• You can have only product feed per catalog. However, you can have multiple catalogs under an Organization.
• We support the Commerce, hotels and flights catalog verticals.

Before you start

Make sure that you have set up a Snapchat Pixel / SDK sending required events for dynamic ads. Check out the Snapchat guide for installing the pixel and the required pixel events.

Catalog permissions

Before starting to set up a Snapchat catalog in Smartly.io, check that you have the needed user permissions. Catalogs are managed in Snap Business Manager under Assets > Catalogs.

Smartly.io uses Snapchat Business permissions to determine if a user can create or edit a catalog in Smartly.io. For managing catalogs, you need to have one of the following permissions:

• Organization Admin: Allows you to see and manage all the catalogs under Organization.
• Catalog Admin: Allows you to see and manage a specific catalog you are an admin of.

ℹ️ Note: While Catalog Advertiser role allows user to see the catalog in Smartly.io, it is not enough to authorize the catalog management (for example feed uploads).

Connect a Snapchat user to manage your Snapchat catalogs

Each Smartly.io user must connect their Snapchat user account in the Snapchat catalog management view so that Smartly.io can see the catalogs the user has access to.

ℹ️ Note: The Smartly.io user specific Snapchat user connection (also known as token or authorisation) is used to authenticate actions, such as viewing or creating a catalog, towards Snapchat. The only exception are the scheduled feed updates that use the authentication of the catalog authoriser and not the authentication of the current user.

ℹ️ Note: The Snapchat user used for catalog management in Smartly is tied to each specific Smartly user per company. If you have multiple companies available in Smartly, you'll need to manage this Snapchat user connection separately for each company.

To connect a Snapchat user account for catalog management:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Catalogs > Snapchat Catalogs. When you enter that view for the first time, you'll see a prompt to connect a Snapchat account to manage catalogs:
   
   
   
2. Click Connect Snapchat user. A pop-up window opens for logging in to Snapchat.
3. Enter your Snapchat username and password and click Continue.
   
   
   
   
   • Once you have successfully logged in, there will be a request to share Smartly.io access to your Snapchat user account. The requested information is required for Smartly.io to show to you the Snapchat Organizations and catalogs you have access to, and to determine that you have the ability to create and manage catalogs in the Organization.
   • The ability to see Organizations and catalogs within Smartly.io is user-specific and based on the access of individual users. Other users will not be able to see which Organizations and catalogs you have access to.
4. Click Continue to connect your Snapchat user account to Smartly.io.
   
   
   
   
5. You should see the message "Your Snapchat user has been connected to Smartly.io". Click Close to close the pop-up window.

After closing the pop-up window, you can select a Snapchat Organization in Smartly.io and see the catalogs you have access to.

Reconnect a Snapchat user to manage your Snapchat catalogs

Sometimes the authorisation between the Snapchat user account and Smartly (also know as the user token) can get invalidated, for example due to a password change. If this happens, you might not be able to see any catalogs listed or your authorisation might not be possible to use to update the catalogs. Sometimes you also might need to change the Snapchat user that is associated with your Smartly user account.

To reconnect a Snapchat user:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Your username > My profile.
2. On the right side of the page, under Authentication > Snapchat, click "Connect a Snapchat account for catalog management".
3. A pop-up window opens for logging in to Snapchat similarly to above guidance. Follow the steps 3-5 in above section to finalise the reconnecting of the Snapchat user to you Smartly user account.

Step 1: Create a Snapchat catalog

To create a new Snapchat catalog:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Catalogs > Snapchat Catalogs.
2. Click Create Catalog. The Snapchat catalog settings page opens.
3. Enter a name for the catalog and select the catalog vertical.
4. Select which pixels and apps you want to use to track the events for this catalog.
   • It is important to select the correct event sources so that the products and audiences are tracked correctly.
5. Click Create.

ℹ️ Note: When you create a new catalog, your user will be set as the catalog authoriser.

Step 2: Add a feed to the catalog

After creating a catalog, you're directed to a feed listing view in the newly created catalog. The feed is where the catalog gets the information about your products.

To add a feed to a Snapchat catalog:

1. Click Add Feed on the right.
2. Enter a name for the feed.
3. In Data source, enter the feed URL.
   • If the feed is hosted on an SFTP server, add the URL in the following format: sftp://username:password@mydomain.com/path/to/file.csv
   • ℹ️ Note: When added as part of the feed URL, there are cases where Smartly.io is unable to encode some special characters used in the username and password. If you spot any fetching issues, try using only alphanumeric values for the username and password instead or try to URL encode any non-URL-safe characters in the file path. For example, instead of a space, use '%20'. 
4. To define the advanced settings for the feed, click Advanced settings. See details on how to define the settings.
5. Select the default currency for the catalog.
   • The default currency is used to add the required currency information to price fields if the currency is missing from the feed. 
6. Under Feed updates, define an update schedule for the feed.
7. After the feed preview loads, map the fields coming from your data source (Feed fields) into the predefined Catalog fields in the Catalog mapping section.
   • If there are any missing or incorrect mappings, see Manual field mapping for more information on how to modify them.
   • The catalog fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required. Other fields are optional.
   • If your feed already contains additional image fields, Smartly.io will overwrite them with Image Template URLs. If you want to use the additional images, map image URL fields from your feed to "custom_label" fields in Smartly.io, and use the custom label fields in Image Templates.
   • If you are using Hotel or Flight vertical catalog and have the "image" field in the JSON format (as it is in the Snapchat feed template), you'll need to use the following liquid template to take the first image from the list of images:

     {%- assign images = image | parse_json -%}
     {{- images[0].link -}}

     The additional fields should be mapped into image templates like highlighted above. See FAQ for further possibilities.
8. Once you are happy with the feed settings and field mapping, click Create New Feed.

Once the above steps are completed, the feed is processed according to the schedule defined under Feed updates. When the feed finishes processing, the catalog is ready to use.

The Smartly.io scheduled feed uploads use Snapchat's "replace" logic. This means that products that don't exist in the feed anymore are deleted from the catalog.

ℹ️ Note: Updating the automatic feed sync schedule will only take effect after the feed is once more processed according to the previous schedule!

Optional: Add Image Templates to the catalog

To make your Snapchat dynamic ads stand out in a creative way, add Image Templates to your catalog in the Image Templates tab. When you use an Image Template in the catalog, you need to also map the catalog fields to the Image Template fields.

Manual field mapping

In Catalog mapping, you can fine-tune the feed content by mapping your data source feed fields to the predefined field names used in Snapchat catalogs. If Smartly.io is not able to automatically map feed fields to catalog product fields, you'll see red warning highlight in the required catalog fields.

Mappings support using dynamic fields, static text, and Liquid templating. To use Liquid templating, select Use Liquid template in the feed field dropdown selector.

As an example of mapping, if your data source contains the product name in the field name, map that to the catalog field title, because that's where Snapchat picks the names of the products.

Preview value shows you a preview of what Snapchat will see as the catalog values. Use the arrows above the column to preview the values for the different products in your feed.

ℹ️ Note: It is important to reduce the number of errors at this point. Otherwise there might be unexpected or incorrect behavior while launching campaigns using the catalog.

Example: Connect a Google Sheet as a data source

1. You need a CSV link to your Google Sheet. See how to use Google Sheet to import a data source.
2. When you have created the CSV link to your sheet, copy and paste it to the Data source field.
3. Smartly.io now fetches a preview (sample) of your data source. The UI shows a notification below the URL field when the feed sample has been successfully fetched.
4. You can define advanced settings and adjust the catalog mapping, or save the feed configuration.

Tracking parameters

Within the catalog, on the link attribute, you can append URL parameters. This includes click trackers, UTM parameters, or Snap URL macros. These parameters should be included on each link prior to connecting the feed. In the Smartly.io feed configuration, it is also possible to use Liquid markup to construct the tracking parameters on the feed setup.

Snap URL macros are also available for tracking parameters. Available macros are:

• {{campaign.name}} - send the associated campaign's name in the product link
• {{adSet.name}} - send the associated ad set's name in the product link
• {{campaign.id}} - send the associated campaign's ID in the product link
• {{adSet.id}} - send the associated ad set's ID in the product link
• {{ad.id}} - send the associated ad's ID in the product link

URL macros can be added also with Liquid templating, but the Snapchat macro needs to be added inside {% raw %} {% endraw %} tags so that we do not process them before sending to Snapchat.

For example, you can add the campaign ID macro to the end of the link:

{{link}}?utm_campaign={% raw %}{{campaign.id}}{% endraw %}

*Do note that the Snap URL macros can also be directly used in URL Tracking Parameters section during Ad Set-up.

Required fields for App Ads

In order to create ads to promote your mobile app with the catalog, by creating dynamic ads with either App Install or Deep Link attachment, the following fields are required in the feed mapping: 

• Icon_media_url
• Ios_app_nam
• Ios_app_store_id
• Ios_url
• Android_app_name
• Android_package
• Android_url
• Mobile_link

For further information regarding the contents of these fields, please refer to Snapchat Business Help.

Required fields for Location Aware catalogs

Location Aware gives advertisers the opportunity to apply location information to their products in a catalog to increase relevance and accuracy for their Dynamic Ads campaigns. With Location Aware enabled, Snapchat is able to ingest latitude, longitude, and availability radius for each product, and dynamically serve ads to users that meet each product’s location criteria. For further information regarding this, please refer to Snapchat Business Help.

In order to take advantage of this feature, the following fields are required in the feed mapping: 

• address
• availability_radius

Catalog Authentication for feed uploads

To set (or reset) the catalog authentication:

1. Make sure you have the needed permissions to update the catalog.
2. In the top navigation bar, click Catalogs > Snapchat Catalogs.
3. In Organization, select the Snapchat Organization that has the catalog you want to update.
4. On the catalog list, find the catalog that you want to update and open the catalog view by clicking the catalog's name.
5. Click Catalog settings.
6. Click Change to current user. This will make you as the new catalog authoriser, wether the catalog already had an authoriser or not.
7. The Catalog Authentication should now say "Authorized by you". On the next feed upload the authentication of your connected Snapchat user will be used.